Sunday, September 27, 2009

ONE PERFECT DAY

Easter Monday, 1971. London.

My flatmate Edward and I awoke on the last day of this long weekend to sunshine and the promise of a beautiful early spring day – the sort of day that brings false hope of an end to winter and for that reason alone needs to be embraced.

We shared a flat in Parkview Court, Fulham, London, SW6. The easterly aspect meant we got any morning sun, over Fulham High St. (The Parkviews, alas, were on the other side.)

I never got used to London winters – does anyone? The cold can be managed, but the long greyness of winter days always got me down, especially coming home from work in the dark.

Occasionally, to cheer ourselves in the depths of winter’s gloom, on a Saturday, Edward and I would have a picnic in the living room. While one of us struggled for ages to get the coke fire going with a gas bayonet (wood and coal fires in Central London have been banned since the lethal fogs of the 1950s. Coke is a smokeless fuel, but a bugger to get going), the other would lay out the picnic rug in front of the fireplace and set out the breads, meats, cheeses, condiments, plates and napkins. We’d sit on the floor munching and yakking away, washing the food down with rotgut Moroccan rose, and listening for the umpteenth time to Nina Simone’s “Here Comes the Sun” album.

But today the sun was blazing – well, as much as it ever blazes in London. This was a day to get out of the house. But what to do? Neither of us had a plan, so we formulated one and put it into action. Breaking out our best flares and platforms, we caught the 22 bus up the New Kings Rd to Chelsea.

After some people-watching and window shopping we came to one of our favourite bistros, Le Bistingo, on the Kings Rd. A coq-au-vin and carafe wine sort of place, it provided us with a satisfying and inexpensive lunch. Now it was only 2.00pm, still sunny, so we decided to stroll up Sloane St to Knightsbridge and cut across to Hyde Park.

The area around the Serpentine was busy with way-too-hopeful sunbathers, kids flying kites and couples paddling hire boats on the water. We eschewed hiring a deckchair (fourpence a throw) and lay ourselves down on the grass and chatted away. I’ll tell you a lot more about Edward Percival one day, suffice to say here that we never got tired of talking to each other. We were at the very least empathic, sometimes almost telepathic and quite good at finishing each other’s sentences. I loved that boy madly.

We had decided that as the day began to fade we’d “take in a movie” as the Yanks would say. Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” had opened to much acclaim and we were both keen to see it. I had read Larry McMurtry’s novel of the same title but it hadn’t grabbed me. If you know the book or the movie, you must remember the scene of the younger, rather simple brother, cap-on-backwards, endlessly sweeping the roadway of the only intersection in this forlorn western town. On paper it didn’t work for me, on the screen it blew me away.

The movie was showing at the classy Curzon cinema in Mayfair and when it was over we were hungry again. We headed straight for Picadilly and the newly-opened Hard Rock Café. It had brought a US-borne breath of fresh air to the London food and nightlife scene. Two years earlier we were gobsmacked when the Great American Disaster chain arrived on the scene. OK, their genuine US hamburgers were a whopping 7 shillings and sixpence (75c) compared to the tired old English Wimpyburger (what a name) at one-and-six (15c). But we’re comparing Veuve to Babycham here.

Now we had our own Hard Rock Café with rock’n’roll blaring. And cheap red wine. And real chips. The queue wasn’t very long, the waitresses were pretty and pert and the joint was buzzing. Oh, what a night.

We staggered out into the street to catch the No 14 bus from Hyde Park Corner (the world’s largest roundabout), home to our separate beds – me to face schoolkids in the morning, Edward to design more trendy shirts for the South Sea Bubble Company. We agreed, almost in unison, that it had been the Perfect Day.

And we’d spent the whole day talking only to each other.

WRITING ON WRITING

It is often said that there is a book in each of us. I have never believed this of myself. I still don’t, but the pendulum is swinging.

So why am I writing these stories? Maybe here I need to indulge in a little meta-writing: let’s write about writing.

And maybe I need to go back a bit, as usual. Over the years, I have amassed a fund of stories and experiences which I have thought to be funny, or at least entertaining. No place for false modesty here – I have trotted these stories out on festive occasions and they have generally been well-received. Perhaps, at times, I have trotted them out once too often, but that’s another story which probably involves wine.

When I retired from full-time work four years ago, people inevitably asked me, “What are you going to do now?” My lazy reply was, “Nothing – that’s what you do when you retire.” That response did not satisfy. One has to do something, I gather.

Then “You should write,” became a common refrain, from many. “But I’m not a writer,” I would defensively reply.

Then I recalled a story told to me by my wonderful friend Noel Tovey. Noel has been a very successful actor and theatre director. He is an aboriginal man, now in his seventies. When he was a seventeen-year-old homosexual living in Melbourne, oh, so long ago, he was at a private gay party which was raided by the police – that’s what happened in those days. The knowing responded by giving a false name when applying for bail and then disappearing off the radar. The courts were quite happy with this arrangement, too. Being young and unknowing, Noel gave his real name and ended up serving time in prison. You don’t want to imagine what a handsome, dark-skinned teenage boy would have gone through.

This is all getting a bit too long, but at least I’m not digressing.

Noel’s agent suggested that he should write a book of his experiences. Noel replied, “I’m an actor, I can’t write a book.”

“But you tell great stories,” said the agent, “Just write them down.” He did and the resultant book, “Little Black Bastard”, I highly recommend to you. He turned it into a very successful one-man stage show.

So I had my inspiration. “Just write them down”. But I still needed encouragement. On my 65th birthday (official retirement time), my great friends Tommy Murphy (as you Aussies would know, he is a highly successful young playwright) and his other half Dane Crawford, presented me with a white box tied in bright red ribbon. (OK, one digression: you know in the movies when the heroine gets a present she doesn’t fiddle about untying ribbons and tearing wrapping paper, she just lifts off the lid? Well, this box was just like that.) Inside was a beautiful pad of antique parchment and a very stylish silver Parker pen, which I now use for my longhand reflections. The birthday card just said, “Now write the fucking book!”

I was caught and they didn’t throw me back.

So now that I have a few stories under my belt, I ask myself: who am I writing for? The first answer is “Me”. A writer whose name I can’t recall wrote, “I write for the reader in me”. That’s not bad. I needed to discover if I could write and if I liked reading what I wrote. So far, so good. I thoroughly enjoy writing and publishing my stories. I am amazed at what I remember.

The second answer is, of course, “You”. When I write something, I hope someone will read it, I hope they might enjoy it and, if so, tell me. This encourages me to write more. I’m also keen to get constructive criticism. Last night my mate Damian talked for almost an hour on what he likes in my writing and how he thinks I could improve it. I lapped it up, but of course, I’m free to ignore his fine advice.

“You” includes also my family. My brothers Robert and Chris lived through the farm years and the floods with me and have made invaluable suggestions and corrections, drawing on their own memories. And I want their children and grandchildren to be able to read stories of the “olden days” and know their family history.

A final point: my stories are true, as true as memory will allow. (The monumental mendacity of my schooldays is behind me, I hope.) In the future they may involve painful memories, which scares me a little.

So I hope that none of my readers thinks that I find the death of a little puppy under a fat lady funny. I don’t. But it happened and I think it raises questions about human nature, as in, “What would you have done?”

My reaction to my first encounter with a Jewish sister shames and embarrasses me. I didn’t like writing it (I actually used much stronger language at the time) but it is true and it helps to explain myself to me.

So I trust that you will continue to read and, I hope, enjoy my ramblings and musings. Please know that at no time have I any desire to offend anyone. But I find myself bounden to the truth.

PS: I should point out that I have had no replies expressing offence – so far. And thank you for your encouraging comments – good for my ego, you know.

Whither I goest thou will be goesting, to paraphrase appallingly the beautiful Book of Ruth.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

TWO FAT LADIES

On the French Riviera, the main drag that runs along the beachfront in Cannes is called La Croisette. It’s a grand, palm-fringed, divided boulevarde lined with very expensive real estate, mainly grand hotels such as the Carlton and the Miramar that we see in the background once a year on TV when the Film Festival is in full swing.

One block back from the waterfront is the much more modest Petite Croisette, a narrow street running more-or-less parallel to its big sister. Here you will find a guest house (or one did in 1969) called the Sweet Home Hotel – yes, and in English, too.

This guest house had been recommended to me by Brian Hawes, a Sydney friend, a dressmaker by calling. In those days, to me, Brian represented the height of sophistication. Probably then in his late 30s, an impeccable dresser, he drove a white Mercedes convertible.

He had a small shop called The Purple Parrot on Bayswater Rd, Rushcutters Bay. Here he designed, made and sold his creations to a wide-ranging clientele of graceful and grateful ladies. It was not unusual to walk into this small salon and find an Eastern Suburbs matron having a fitting whilst a local prostitute was instructing her young daughter to remove the fives and tens (maybe even some twenties and fifties, if it had been a good night) from an old paper bag, unfold them, smooth them out and arrange them in appropriate piles, by colour, before she made a purchase.

Across the road from The Purple Parrot was the very eccentric Belvedere Hotel, run by two equally eccentric elderly sisters. An old pile that had grown rather than been built, it was a rabbit warren of rooms furnished in a style that makes the word “eclectic” an understatement in the extreme.

Each year, when Brian staged his fashion show, he and his partner, Philip Morwich would stay at the Belvedere, rather than make the long journey home to Palm Beach, on the northern-most fringe of Sydney. They stayed in a top-floor suite where the bathroom had a high attic window with no glass. Each morning, the free standing bathtub with its alligator feet was full of autumn leaves. In another suite, the bathtub had two shower roses, one at each end.

But I digress.

At Palm Beach, Brian and Philip had a modest cottage on the hillside, but its crowning glory was a magnificent terrace, looking westward over Pittwater. This, as one wit remarked, was “the best room in the house”. The deck was paved in white marble. For years Brian had haunted second-hand shops and bought up, for a song, scores of marble-topped coffee tables and sewing machine tables – the sort with wrought iron bases. These marble tops now paved his terrace, surrounded by a very camp Cinderella balustrade.

It was his custom regularly to host Sunday lunch parties. The menu never varied: prawn cocktail, the prawns hanging over the edge of a martini glass stuffed with shredded lettuce and thousand-islands dressing; lamb casserole and bread-and-butter pudding, washed down with copious quantities of sparkling Burgundy.

I was fortunate to be a frequent guest at these lunches, thanks to John Heffernan, a mutual friend. John was a tenor with the Australian opera company and a member of the “Revue ‘62” show, where he sang and danced in the chorus of Digby Wolfe’s highly acclaimed Sunday night variety program on Channel 9. John drove a white Datsun Fair Lady convertible and was known as “Hilda Heffernan, the Whore of the Highways” for reasons I might explain one day.

But, again, I digress.

Another regular guest was Beryl Cheers. Beryl was a short woman of generous proportions. Unlike John, she was not a minor performer, she was a star in her own right. Appearing on TV and in cabaret all across the country, she could belt out a song and was a gifted comedienne.

Now, Brian’s terrace was furnished with a glass-topped dining table and wrought iron chairs. Along the edge of the terrace were two three-seater swinging lounges, suspended from A-frames under a canopy, all covered in very floral duck – the sort you saw in “Meet Me in St Louis” when Judy sang “The Boy Next Door”.

The custom, almost a necessity, after lunch was to doze off or fall asleep in these lounges, or wherever, before the long drive back to the city (except for the time I ended up in a foursome, but that’s another story).

Brian and Philip’s pride and joy was Missy, their beloved miniature dachshund. Eventually Missy fell pregnant and produced a litter of five beautiful little puppies. One Sunday evening, as we roused ourselves from our post-prandial slumber, Brian and Philip gathered together Missy and her precious babies. To their horror, they could only find four. As Beryl snored on in blissful ignorance, a frantic search was mounted for the missing puppy. Alas, to no avail. Amidst great concern, Beryl was wakened, informed of the tragic news and we all prepared to leave, as there seemed nothing else we could do. At this point, Beryl felt something soft and smooth crushed behind her back in the folds of the swinging lounge. She stealthily reached around and felt a still warm, but seemingly lifeless body. Being not too many brain cells removed from Sherlock Holmes, she apprehensively put two-and-two together. Surreptitiously, she grasped the offending item and stuffed it in her handbag. As she drove home through Frenchs Forest she reached into her handbag and flung the decidedly deceased doggy into the woodlands.

Of course, she told no one this story until many years later, after a very drunken dinner at the San Francisco Bar in Bulletin Place at Circular Quay (long since gone). I happened to be there.

However, yet again I digress.

This story started on the French Riviera, and there shall it end..

On the aforementioned Petite Croisette, not far from the Sweet Home Hotel, was a small bistro called, would you believe, Le Petit Carlton (not much imagination, those French). Here I decided to have a glass of wine, which meant testing my then appalling French. I asked the waiter for “un vin rouge, avec glace”, thinking – nay, hoping – “glace” meant “glass”. I didn’t want a whole bottle (how times have changed!). The waiter looked at me rather superciliously, (God, I love that word), but wandered dutifully off.

When he returned with, yes, a glass of red wine full of ice, I realised I had not the great mastery of French that I possess today (in-joke). But, determined to make the most of it, I murmured “merci” and toyed with my glass ever so nonchalantly, as if this were how I always took my wine.

I looked around the room at my fellow diners and my eyes lit upon a middle-aged woman of Beryl Cheers proportions. She was a type I immediately recognised. The assisted-blonde (as I think Dorothy Parker wrote) coiffure was stressed and sprayed into place, her creamy summer frock was a little too frilly for her age and she was covered in gold – earrings, necklace and bracelets.

“Bloody rich Jewish bitch,” I thought to myself.

I did not know any Jews at that time, but I knew all about them. They killed Jesus. (Although I had gratefully abandoned my Catholicism by then, doubts still lingered…) But, the thing is, I had seen them in Double Bay in their Mercedes and their BMWs. Why did they have all the money?

I looked at her again. That’s when I saw the numbers tattooed on her forearm.

My blood froze. The wine remained untouched. I fled.

Monday, September 21, 2009

THE FARM YEARS - FINALE

When I was 14 Mum and Dad asked me if I’d like to learn to play the piano. Would I! My sister Nanette had learned piano from the nuns and played quite well from sheet music. Years before, in Ryde, Nanette’s brother-in-law John Leonard would knock out popular songs of the day on the piano at Nona and Grandfather’s. I was always there, clapping along to the music. Now, on the farm, Nanette taught me the notes on the sheet music and how they corresponded to the piano keys, key signatures and time signatures. I could pick out a tune OK, but I couldn’t play with two hands.

In North Lismore there was a piano teacher called Mrs Rix. She was perhaps in her sixties or seventies and so popular that my lesson was at 7.30 am on a Friday. (How did I get there? I vaguely remember Alan Lowe dropping me off on his way to work.) I progressed rapidly and after a few weeks she asked me if I wanted to concentrate on classical or popular. Hey, I was a fourteen-year-old boy! Popular it was. Over the next months as well as all the scales she taught me to read guitar chords (these are printed on popular sheet music). With these I could play a vamp bass to the melody line – it’s a short cut, but it worked. Soon I was thumping away with both hands. The downside is that I’m an appalling sight reader, but happily I have a “good ear” so that eventually, I didn’t even need the sheet music. I could listen to a song on the radio a few times, then play it. By the age of fifteen, the lessons had ended (money) and I was playing in my own dance band. And what a legacy this was to become! Piano playing has literally taken me around the world.

Lismore boasted something very special. At the Riviera Ballroom, on the banks of the Richmond River (and likely to slide in at any time) on each Saturday night, Stan Chilcott and his orchestra played for a 50-50 dance. This was no ordinary dance band. It was a 14-piece ensemble, drums, guitar, piano, bass, saxes, trumpets and trombones, the full Glenn Miller/Benny Goodman swing band. The only one of its kind in the 500 mile stretch from Sydney to Brisbane. From the age of 15 I was allowed to go there with my older cousin Paul on Saturday nights. I loved it – I learned all the old-time dances - gipsy tap, Canadian three-step, Pride of Erin – as well as the modern foxtrot and quickstep. I distinctly remember Agnes McNamara teaching me the barn dance to Jerome Kern’s beautiful “Long Ago and Far Away” –not Kern’s intention, I suspect, but at strict dance tempo it worked. I believe the band still plays, with many of the original players, over 50 years later.

I’ve told you about my time at high school, but I’ll close this somewhat exhaustive account with three last school anecdotes.

One morning, for reasons I now forget, I decided to wag first period. The roll was taken and I was found to be missing. The class teacher decided to check with my brother Robert, who said, yes, I had been on the bus. So during second period I received a message to report at play lunch to the office of the headmaster, Br Emile. He was a good, upright and approachable man, and rather handsome. He asked me what had happened. I told him I had got off the bus at the Goolmangar village and it had taken off without me. Of all my multitude of lies, this was the most appalling and the most implausible – didn’t stand up for a minute, and I knew it. For example, how had I subsequently got to school? He said, “Come back and see me at lunch time”. I did so, apprehensively. He said, “See me after school.” I couldn’t do this, as I had to go straight to the bus and he knew it. I realised he was deeply disappointed in me, and wanted nothing more than to wash his hands of the matter. I was extremely ashamed. I guess that was his intention. I think that might have ended my lying years.

We had a science lab. In our final year, the overworked science teacher allowed us six boys to do our experiments unsupervised. How foolish. The game developed that when you walked through the lab door, someone would throw you a glass beaker. The rules demanded that you immediately throw it to someone else, and so on until someone dropped it. And you may recall, I was physically handicapped when it came to throwing, let alone catching. Much broken glass ensued. Then someone dropped the phosphorous into a beaker of water. It buzzed and bubbled, but thankfully didn’t explode. Then we put silver nitrate in the holy water fonts at the entrance to each class (Catholics will understand). This was a clear liquid, but stained your fingers black (and your forehead, if you were really devout). And at the end of the year, the science teacher told us how well-behaved and trustworthy we had turned out to be.

Finally, sex. We had had no formal sex education, though I had finally found out where babies came from and, what’s more, how they got there. Fr Casey, a young curate, had decided things had reached a crisis point (perhaps from things he was hearing in the confessional) and took matters into his own hands. Fifth Year had a series of Formal Lessons on Sex Education. Big time! Diagrams were displayed on the blackboard and things were explained in great detail. Eventually we got the explicit diagram of the female genitalia in all its glory. As he finished his explanation, pointing again at this mystifying diagram, Fr Casey said, with great piety, “… and remember, boys, the finger of God is in all of this.” I thought I’d burst my sides. He spotted my spluttering and said, looking straight at me, “Isn’t it, Hugh?” I don’t know how I regained enough composure to reply, “Yes, Father”.

Here endeth the lesson.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

LIFE ON THE FARM 3 -SOCIAL LIFE AND MILESTONES

The Goolmangar church formed a focus of community life. Father Smith lived in the presbytery next to the church, so we had Mass every Sunday, unlike some rural communities. As I have said, the area was populated with a great many Catholics of Irish descent. We’d hang around after Mass, the adults gossiping and the kids running around the parked cars, until rumbling tummies sent us home to breakfast –of course, we had been fasting since midnight, despite having milked a herd of cows. I was now head altar boy, very proud of the hem of four inches of lace on my white surplice, worn over my red soutane. One morning, during the sermon, I accidentally hit the gong used to signal the consecration. Fr Smith announced, “Well, looks like I’ve got the gong,” and promptly concluded the sermon. But he was a real nutter with a fiery Irish temper. If he walked into the sacristy and flung his bag and papers on to the table, I knew we were in for a bumpy ride. Then some commotion flared up and he became aware that some parishioners were not happy with him. After Mass he promptly placed his chair centre stage, before the blessed tabernacle, sat himself down in full regalia, amice, alb, cincture, chasuble, the lot and demanded someone tell him what the problem was. As my brother Robert also recalls, he harangued and ranted away for a long time. I don’t think anyone else spoke – after all, you were never to talk in church, apart from reciting the prayers. I think that’s the last we saw of him. We had visiting priests for a while.

During these years, many Italians, mostly single men, or with families back in Italy, had arrived on the north coast of NSW. They rented small acreages on the high, non-pasture bits of the farms, where they built small sheds and cultivated and grew bananas. They didn’t assimilate with us, though there was no animosity. They spoke little English and none of us had a word of Italian. The Lismore Bishop (Farrelly?) was concerned for their religious wellbeing, so two priests of the Scallabrini order were appointed to Goolmangar parish.. They were an Italian order with a specific brief to minister to Italians abroad. Our two, Frs Miazzi and Molon were delightfully young and modern and soon the choir was singing very jazzy hymns that I’m not sure even Bishop Farrelly would have approved of. But they were much livelier than the dreary “Mother Dearest, Mother Fairest”, “Hail Queen of Heaven” and the dreadful “Faith of Our Fathers” we had been droning out for years. Church life had become buzzy and breezy again.

Dick Mazzer drove the Kirklands school bus from Nimbin to Lismore each morning and back again in the afternoon. As I have written elsewhere, from about the age of 14 I used to drive my brothers and the neighbour kids down to the turnoff to catch this bus. Then Kirklands, no doubt in a money-making move, decided to put me out of business with a shuttle minibus service of their own. This was driven by Mrs Mazzer, an out-and-out vile bitch. She obviously hated the job, hated kids (she had none) and spent every journey telling us to sit up and shut up. I complained to Mum and Dad, but they did nothing.

Three major family milestones occurred during our years on the farm – two happy, one very sad. I’ll let Dad tell you about them:

...On July 25th 1954 John (my older, half-brother) was ordained a priest in St Carthages Cathedral Lismore. A really great occasion. I think we supplied 14 muscovy ducks to help with the reception (held on the farm). These Pauline and Mac (Blewitt) cleaned and dressed and the neighbours helped with the cooking. He said his first Mass in our little Goolmangar church...

...Prior to this on the 26th of May 1955, there was great excitement when Dorothy (my only sister) was born. After three sons we were hoping for a daughter, and since she was the first grand daughter after 7 grand sons, the Byrne family were very elated...

My half-sister Nanette and her husband Alan lived with us on the farm after marrying in January 1956. They later returned to live in Sydney. Now the sad story:

...their baby Anne was born on the 10th of September 1956. Then tragedy raised its ugly head once more. On the Sunday Anne was christened, her mother Nanette took ill. She suffered a severe haemorrhage. She was admitted to Ryde hospital. They tried unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding. This made x-ray useless. They assumed the trouble was being caused by a disrupted stomach ulcer, and on that assumption about the end of the week they decided to operate. Unfortunately their assumption was wrong. Instead they found she had a malformation of the veins in the stomach. These had burst. They were not prepared for this situation, and not geared to handle it, so the operation had to be abandoned. John was holidaying with us at the time so he and I flew down. She was then moved to St Vincent’s, where in spite of the best medical skill available she died a week later on the 14th of October 1956...

Dad married his first wife, Frances Hatton, in 1930. In due time along came John, Pattie and Nanette. But two tragedies were hovering. In 1936, aged almost four years, Pattie fell from a trellis in the garden. She hit the back of her head on a rock and died instantly. Three years later a flu epidemic hit the area and Frances succumbed to double pneumonia and died. So now Dad had lost a wife and two daughters. Anne, Nanette’s baby, would never know her mother. But today she is a wonderful wife and mother herself and we love her madly.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

LIFE ON THE FARM 2 - FLOODS

When we arrived in 1953 the area was in the grip of a prolonged drought. This was decisively broken by a record flood in February 1954, only three months after I had arrived. Our farmhouse was on rising ground, about 200 metres from the creek. We watched apprehensively as the creek filled to a level where it would break its banks. The cattle had been moved to high ground. Now it was time to release the pigs from their paddock down near the river and let them scamper, along with ducks, chickens and various farm dogs, up to the house yard and under the house – the foundations weren’t much more than a foot off the ground, so there was a constant bumping of piglets against floor boards throughout the day and night.

The waters rose rapidly over two days and nights, until the farmhouse was marooned. We kids were excited – we were on an island, no school, and all this drama – but we knew we were fairly safe. Upstream from us was the Coffee Camp School and we knew it had been destroyed when desks, chairs, a blackboard and even a piano came floating by. The stream was fast and furious and murky brown.

Finally the rain stopped and the sun shone. But the waters took ages to disperse. The Goolmangar and Wilsons Creeks meet at North Lismore to form the Richmond River. From Lismore the river meanders for 70 miles (about 110 kms) to the ocean at Ballina. In this course it drops only 36 feet (about 10 metres). The flood waters took weeks to drain and disperse. Meanwhile the sun started to dry things up, resulting in steamy humidity and an appalling stench of rotting cattle corpses (some trapped up in the telephone lines that bordered the roads), other dead animals and vegetation. The process of cleaning up began. The shops in Lismore’s four main streets were all flooded, some to a height of two metres or more. Food and merchandise were destroyed and silt covered everything. The shopkeepers had taken few flood precautions and it all happened very quickly. Two weeks earlier the Queen and Prince Phillip had paraded through town on their 1954 Royal Visit to Australia through streets festooned with flags and bouquets. Now the sight of sagging shaggy bunting and streamers drooping from the lampposts only emphasised the sadness of it all.

We lost no stock and were relatively unscathed – a few fences needed mending where debris had crashed through. Low paddocks had turned into lakes and ponds which took weeks to dry out. However, the rich, loamy silt did wonders for the growth of fodder.

Marist Brothers High had copped the full force, except for two classroom blocks which were up on stilts. Fortunately First Year (Year Seven), my year, was on stilts, but other kids had desks full of soggy, useless books and whatever.

Gradually things returned to normal and farming life resumed. However, the flood was followed by a very dry 1955 and it became clear that this accumulation of disasters meant that the farm could definitely not support two families. The Blewetts moved back to Sydney apart from cousin Paul, who was sixteen or so. He had left school and stayed on as a paid farm worker.


Well, as we all know, the benevolent Lord moves in mysterious ways and seems to love to test us. In 1956 we had an even bigger flood and this one was a doozy. (It wasn’t higher in the Lismore township, but it was on our farm.) But this time there were family complications. My sister Nanette and her husband Alan Lowe were staying with us and on the morning of the first heavy rain were due to travel to Casino, perhaps an hour’s drive, to catch the train back to Sydney. Mum and Dad had planned to drive them to Casino and despite the heavy rain, decided all would be OK. They were wrong. They hadn’t got to Lismore before the road was flooded and they had to turn back. But now the low culvert on the West Nimbin Road was also under water. They were marooned. This was at Frank Boyle’s farm, so they took refuge there. They were anxious to get back to the farm where we kids were in the care of Nona and Grandfather, Mum’s elderly parents. Frank led them up the hill beside the stream that was flooding the culvert until they came to a fallen tree across the much narrower stream. All four in turn straddled this and then kept to the high ground, crossing several farms and crawling through fences and wading waterways.

When they finally came in sight of Aintree they were pretty much exhausted and appalled to see that the farmhouse was completely isolated on its own little island. Indeed, more than that, this time the floodwaters, higher than 1954, flowed freely under the house. The pigs were paddling and the poultry were seeking shelter in the trees. From the neighbouring Handford farm they could see just the very tops of the fence posts of the horse paddock, leading from the farm border to the house paddock. They decided to follow this line, clinging to the fence wires and fighting a very strong current. (If memory serves, I remember Paul Blewitt setting out from our side to meet them, then guide them back.) They made it, cold, wet and shivering, very fatigued and much in need of warm towels and clothes and hot tea.

Whilst they were coping with this ordeal, I had witnessed an awesome sight. To give some background: somewhere in the early 20th century my grandfather decided to fell a huge teak tree by the creek’s edge. He had hoped to fell it along the line of the road so that its trunk could form a part of the fence. However, it fell across the creek, requiring major surgery (to the tree, that is) to remove now useless limbs and such, until the only things left were the stump and a base section of its trunk which measured a good six feet (2 metres) in diameter and about 25 feet (10 metres) in length. This huge log lay there, useless, until 1956. Alongside it he built a large pigsty – a barn almost as big as the farmhouse itself with attic storage for fodder.

During this flood, the waters rose halfway up the galvanised iron roof of this pigsty, until maybe only the top one metre of the roof could be seen. As my grandparents, brothers and I watched the dramatic flow past of trees, furniture, household appliances, and the odd cow, we were awestruck as the visible part of the roof slowly turned through 180 degrees and sank into the swirling, muddy waters. That’s when we knelt down and started saying the rosary. This was no longer fun, like the first flood.

We discovered, when the waters subsided, that the power of the flood had picked up this enormous teak trunk, bowled it straight through the pigsty, which was now a shambles, and carried it a good 150 metres through some fences until it came to rest in the front paddock where, to my knowledge, it rests to this day.

The Good Lord was surely testing us.

The townsfolk and merchants were much better prepared this time; they had learned from the disaster of 1954. For example, some stores had clothing cabinets and display cases designed to rise and float on the waters. This flood hit us harder than the people in the town.

But life slowly returned to normal, as it does. School resumed. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I was in a classroom at ground level – that one where we used to climb out the window between periods – and in my desk my school books were all a soggy mess, along with the rotting bananas and apples that had festered there for way too long, as, in those days, they did in your average schoolboy’s desk.